Too much pressure is put on children to become sport stars and most youngsters
"will never make it", says leading academic

Parents should stop encouraging their children to become sporting heroes, because most youngsters “will never make it”, a leading academic has said.

Ellis Cashmore, a professor of culture, media and sport at Staffordshire University, said today’s children were more likely to win The X Factor than become sports stars.

In an outspoken interview, the professor also claimed football-mad children could end up on performance-enhancing drugs, and argued that society puts “too much value” on sport.

“We shouldn’t be trying to channel all of our energy into this pursuit of excellence in sports when very, very few children are going to succeed at any kind of level at all,” he said.

“My answer to parents who tell me their child might become a leading footballer or athlete is that they are putting them at risk of serious injury or closer to the world of performance-enhancing drugs.”

The professor, who has published books on David Beckham and Mike Tyson, also told the Sunday Mercury that youngsters who play too much sport become “one-dimensional characters”.

“Take two people — Lance Armstrong, a proven cheat — and Rafa Nadal, who isn’t a cheat,” he said. “Nadal is an odd character, an OCD case, who never talks about anything other than tennis.

“Watch the behaviour that he has to go through with every ball in every game. He’s a complete obsessive compulsive.”

The national child-measurement programme recently showed that one in three pupils aged 10 or 11 were obese or overweight, and more than a fifth of children in reception classes were overweight.

However, Prof Cashmore attacked PE teachers for pushing competitive sport on “an industrial scale”. He said: “At football matches, parents treat their children like interns in a concentration camp. I feel like saying to them, 'Your son is trying to enjoy himself, by the way!’

“Sport used to be marginal; now it’s an integral part of mainstream culture, and we put too much value into it. It’s not going to pull us out of the recession, give us peace on Earth or save the planet.”

Prof Cashmore, author of Making Sense of Sport, also claimed Britain’s Winter Olympics success would fail to inspire the nation’s youth.

“You could stop 100 people in the street and ask them to name any competitors. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could,” he said.

“The level of awareness of the Winter Olympics is zero, and nobody was in the slightest bit interested. So why do we spend all of this money training people to do something we are not very good at?

“The medals table proves the Winter Olympics is for affluent countries — and where are the black athletes?

“In six months’ time people will have forgotten all about curling.”

A Department of Health spokesman said it was “crucially important” that young people were encouraged to take up sport.

He said: “We want to inspire young people, whatever their ability, to get involved in competitive sport. Not just so they lead healthy, active lifestyles, but also so they develop new skills and learn to work as a team.”